For decades, the web ran on a simple deal: Publishers and businesses made information freely accessible, search engines and other crawlers indexed it, and those services sent human traffic back. Websites can then monetize the traffic through advertising, subscriptions, or commerce.
But that’s all changing quickly, Cloudflare chief strategy officer Stephanie Cohen told the CoinDesk Consensus conference in Miami on Tuesday.
With the rise of AI agents, software can crawl web pages, summarize the content and retain the source user in a chatbot or automated workflow, rather than sending the person back to the original site. Cohen said this shift is disrupting the internet’s old business model, with non-human traffic now outpacing human engagement.
The solution proposed by Cloudflare is to give websites more control over automated traffic: identify bots, verify who they are, understand what they intend to do and decide whether to allow, block or charge them. Cohen pointed to x402, an open payments protocol built around the HTTP 402 “Payment Required” status code, as part of the stack.
“There are a billion 402 responses on the Cloudflare network every day,” said Cohen. Status codes have become part of the technical foundation of x402, the open proxy payments framework developed by Cloudflare in conjunction with Coinbase.
“Imagine a billion voices saying, I want to keep producing whatever I’m producing, but I need to pay for it to keep doing it,” Cohen said.
CoinDesk reported in March that on-chain activity related to the protocol was still small and experimental, with x402’s daily processing volume at the time being around $28,000. Cohen’s comments indicate that Cloudflare sees greater potential demand at the network layer.
She sees this shift as a structural change in the way the internet works. “More than half of the traffic on the entire Internet today is non-human traffic,” she said, “and non-human traffic is growing much faster than human traffic.” A decade ago, she said, a crawler visited a website twice and sent back a human visitor. Today, the ratio is “tens of thousands to one for the artificial intelligence companies crawling your website,” undermining the advertising and subscription models that have long funded online content.
She positioned Cloudflare as a rebuilt network layer infrastructure, rather than the payments rail itself. Cohen said the company handles more than 100 million requests per second at peak times, comparing Swift to about 68 million messages per day.
Cohen also points to Cloudflare’s Web Bot Auth cryptographic verification stack and recent work involving Visa and Experian as part of the next layer of proxy commerce. The goal, she said, is to help merchants accept purchases initiated by AI agents while verifying that there is a real person behind each transaction.
“We believe that if we get it right, there will be a golden age of content where high-quality original content will be valued,” Cohen said.
